Night's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Sometimes she would sit in the window of her grandfather’s house. The old man was slow and tired. Alarmed at the cost, he paid a servant woman to be the escort of Shezael, to purchase and mend her garments, and take her to walk about the city by unfrequented byways. This servant was good natured, but a guardian watchful for the safety of her charge. Sometimes she would lead Shezael to the temple, and would pray there for the girl to be healed of her bizarre affliction, while Shezael would gaze expressionlessly at the blue tinted air.

  Three months after Shezael had become seventeen, the servant woman took her for one of these unsatisfactory visits to the temple and in the holy place they came on the wandering minstrel they had met there half a year before. He appeared to be thanking the gods for his safe return to the city, but when he saw the servant and her charge he hurried up to them.

  “Were I but a rich man, did I but lead a settled life,” said he, “I would wed this maiden gladly. Though she is bedimmed, she is more lovely than a lotus.”

  “Be off,” said the servant, but she did not mean it. The minstrel, for all his roguish trade, was no rogue, but gentle and amiable. Presently they sat to talk in the temple porch, while Shezael stood gazing at the clouds, the flowering trees, the ocean.

  The minstrel told his adventures. How he had sung in poor inns and busy markets. Of the robbers who had beset him but let him free in exchange for a song or two, seeing they were starved of culture and he mostly penniless, of the wonders of a town where the richer streets were paved with slabs of jade, and another town by a lake where trained birds could imitate all manner of noises, barking dogs and lowing cattle and tinkling bells—yet could not sing a note. Last, he told her of how he had made a song about the sad beauty of Shezael (the woman scolded him, looking pleased), and rendered it in the war camp of a king. “And then,” declared the minstrel, “a young madman strode from a tent and snatched my little harp and tore loose all the strings. What a thing, you may say,” said the minstrel. “But there is worse, for I have had to fashion a new harp. When I restrung the old, I found the seventh string was tangled with a single long hair from the madman’s head—a hair of fine greyish blond, near enough the color of the string itself. Try as I might, I could not get this single strong hair free from the seventh string of the harp. And now, listen.” And taking the instrument from his pack, the minstrel plucked all its strings, one after another. Six had a clear sweet tone, but the seventh, where the single hair was tangled, groaned.

  The servant clutched his arm. “Ah! Throw it away! The harp is possessed.”

  “Wait!” whispered the minstrel, “look at the girl.”

  Shezael had turned. Her face was changed. Intent and serious, she stared at the harp, her eyes focused, her lips parted. And suddenly she laughed. Not a fool’s laughter, the laughter of sheer joy, which there is no mistaking. Then, coming straight to the minstrel, she lifted the harp from his unresisting hands. Turning about once more, Shezael began to walk away, as if at last she had learned the road home.

  The woman was alarmed. The minstrel was curious, moved, yet not amazed. He had half expected something of the sort, had come every day to the temple for a month, meaning to meet Shezael and her guardian for the purpose of proving some weird magic he had sensed in the air.

  That night, Shezael placed the harp beside her bed. It was the narrow bed her mother, black-fated Bisuneh, had slept in. Shezael did not disturb the strings of the harp, but she looked at it till her eyelids fell shut.

  Her existence had been like a dream, her dreams sometimes more acute than her existence. Now she dreamt with a vivid clarity. She became another.

  She was a shepherd boy, she had killed a wolf, no, it was a dragon. She was a king’s champion, she slew giants. She was called Drezaem. She was a youth, tall, sun-burned, handsome, with eyes of bronze. She was a warrior, yet she fled into the empty plains. She lay near dead in the cruel heat of the day. Sometimes she roared and moaned and wept from an intolerable, inconsolable sense of loss she did not understand.

  Shezael woke as the sun woke, her cheeks wet with tears, without sorrow.

  She rose and dressed herself. She smiled upon the garden from the window. She plucked a rose and left it on her grandfather’s knee where he slept in his chair, a chrysanthemum and left it on the pillow of the sleeping servant woman.

  Shezael knew her path as if she had read it from a map.

  She took the path unhesitatingly, without a second thought. Hers was the female portion of the soul, obscure, sensitive to occult things.

  The path led her through the morning city, through the tall gate, along the highway, into the wide world.

  She knew her way by instinct, yet blindly. She had not foreseen or reasoned that it lay across three lands, a range of mountains, many wide rivers, a great lake. Neither was she conscious of dangers or necessities. She set forth without provisions of any kind. She set forth as the metal pin flies to the magnet, the tide to the beach, for she had never possessed human logic or caution, obscure Shezael. Only the tug of her lost half-soul drew her.

  She left the city and the sea behind, and quickly came on a deserted track. Night fell and Shezael did not heed it. When she grew very weary, she lay down and slept on the bare earth, and started up at the first ray of dawn and went on. Several days she walked, without food, only once or twice pausing to drink when a stream ran beside her path. A growing weakness barely impinged on her thought, but at length she could go no farther.

  It had happened that a slave-dealer had chosen this track to reach the nearest town. His men found Shezael lying by the roadside, and set up a clamour. The slave-dealer called them off. He liked the look of the girl, who would make an excellent pleasure-slave. He forced broth between her teeth and lifted her into one of the carts.

  It was a journey of four days, and took the route Shezael must in any case have traveled. Perhaps because she sensed this, Shezael neither cried out nor attempted to evade them. If she was aware of her captors, it was only as a helpful agency, bearing her towards her goal.

  They reached the town. The market ran up into rich streets lined with white mansions, and every fourth paving stone was made of green jade. The slave-dealer set Shezael on a rostrum. The bidding began quickly, but tapered off as the buyers noticed the girl’s peculiar emotionless staring. At length a young nobleman stepped forward.

  “This girl is witless and dumb. Anyone can see.” The slave-dealer remonstrated. “Then tell her to speak,” said the nobleman.

  This the slave-dealer did, loudly, and to no avail. The crowd of potential buyers began to mutter and turn away. The dealer raised his whip, but the young nobleman caught his arm. “No matter. I have too many chattering women in my house as it is. I will buy her.”

  Money changed hands and documents were signed. The nobleman led Shezael to his chariot. When they reached his mansion, he conducted her inside, and showed her a marble room hung with rose velvet, and had slaves bring her food and wine.

  “This chamber shall be yours. These slaves shall be yours. I set you free, you shall be my beloved, but I will not own you.” The nobleman took Shezael’s hand. “I heard of you in a song, a maiden with such hair and eyes. But can you be as the minstrel said, ‘half-souled’?” As it transpired, it was not only in the king’s war camp that the minstrel had sung his song of Shezael.

  Shezael had been gazing about her, gradually becoming more agitated with the need to away. Yet, when the nobleman spoke those words, she looked at him with a terrible profundity. The nobleman realized he was in the presence of another’s destiny, and so forceful was this aura of fate that he could not withstand it.

  When she walked from the room, he did not stop her, but he accompanied her. “You must not leave here as you came,” he said. “Clearly you are making a journey of great need, but to travel alone will put you in the way of danger again. Come, I will give you my chariot and the three white geldings that draw it and a groom to drive them, and bread and drink so you shall not s
tarve.”

  All this was done. The nobleman, as if in the grip of a spell, did not regret the loss of his coins, only of Shezael, and her he did not hinder. He swore the groom to protect her also. The three white horses tossed their heads.

  “Which way must I go, mistress?” asked the groom.

  But the nobleman said: “She looks towards the mountains—go that way. And do not return to me till she is safe.”

  The chariot journeyed swiftly. It raced along ancient tracks, and crossed the mountains in two days by the wide pass. But in the valley below robbers beheld it.

  A bow twanged. The groom pitched over the rail, dead from an arrow in his breast; a robber jumped into the chariot, seized the reins and checked the horses. Another seized Shezael: “Here is a fine treasure!”

  Next the chief of the robbers came. He cuffed them aside, and lifted Shezael in his arms and examined her. Eventually he said: “This is the witch-girl the minstrel sang of,” and he set her down gingerly. Instantly she turned and began to walk away, leaving the chariot, the dead groom, the dumbfounded robbers. Superstitious, they did not go after her. They had a robber-god which they worshipped in a cave. His creed declared: “For every fifty travelers robbed and slain, let one go free. The gods care for excess in nothing.”

  Shezael came to a broad rushing river. The ferryman caught her back from the brink.

  “By my life, you cannot walk on the water, lady. I must ferry you across, and you must pay me.” But, looking in her eyes, the ferryman said: “Why, you are the maiden the minstrel sang of. You shall be ferried for nothing.”

  The next river had a bridge. Fruit trees grew along the track now, and berries, which sustained the wandering girl, for she plucked them absently, as she had been taught to pluck the figs from the tree in the garden of her grandfather’s house.

  Shezael passed, unseeing, through five villages. In the fifth, a woman ran and brought her a loaf: “You are the maid in the song. Good fortune go with you in whatever you are seeking, for surely you are magic.”

  She had crossed into the third land, over mountains and waters. She passed along a road, and would have seen, if she had looked, the king’s capital shining in the distance and, seven miles beyond it, the snow-capped mountain where the dragon had eaten men, and perished at the hands of Drezaem.

  Finally Shezael entered a town on the shores of a vast lake. Here on the quay, beside the silken water, an old lady was slowly walking up and down with her servants, and on a golden leash she led a green bird, which now and then would bark vigorously.

  “I see a child with beautiful hair,” said the old lady. “In a moment she will fall in the lake. Go, one of you, and bring her to me.”

  Shezael was brought to the old lady with the barking bird.

  “Yes, as I thought,” said the old lady. “She is the maiden of the minstrel’s song. And truly, I believe she is half-souled, as he said. Can it be she is searching for the other half? Well, she shall have a boat to aid her over the lake. Go under the auspices of the gods, my child. And beware the snares of night.”

  Thus Shezael came over the lake and reached the empty plains where Drezaem wandered in his melancholy anger.

  3. Night’s Sorcery

  Drezaem had lived in the plains many months. He had survived by braining snakes and rodents with a heavy stone and eating them raw, not thinking to make a fire. For drink, he found subterranean streams in the caves where he crawled to avoid the midday heat. On this limited sparse fare he had become gaunt. His hair was more grey than fair now, his eyes huge and savage. His heart was leaden, he did not comprehend what caused his grief, had forgotten what began it. Some nights, under the cold stars he would howl with anguish. and even the wolf would fall silent, in uneasy respect for his cries.

  There came a night like any other, ebony bright with a silver sweat of stars. As the moon rose, a tall man came walking over the plain before it. His cloak was black, but his hair blacker: blacker than both, his eyes.

  Drezaem had mislaid the notion of men, except as enemies to fight and slay. He surged up, snarling. But the black haired man dissolved into a smoke, which came and wrapped itself about the youth. The wild beast faded at the touch of the smoke. Drezaem’s eyelids drooped, and the murder in him slept.

  “Now,” said the black eyed man, handsome as the night, standing at the young man’s side, “you shall be my son, and I will make you glad again. For you have lived too long, my infant, like a jackal of the plains.”

  Drezaem raised his head. His eyes met the stranger’s eyes. Through the layers of confusion and mist that clouded his perceptions, the eyes of the unknown man pierced like two black flaming lights.

  “Look here,” said Azhrarn, the Prince of Demons, pointing at a massive pile of featureless granite about a mile off. Drezaem looked.

  The night shuddered. Every surface of the plains resounded as if to the chord of an enormous harp, and the pile of granite was altered. A palace stood there now, a marvel of glinting melanic crystal and polished jet, with towers of silver, roofs of brass, windows of turquoise and crimson which blazed with lamps. Before it lay gardens carpeted by dark velvet moss, avenues paved with jewels, black trees sculpted into fantastic shapes, lavender fountains and purple pools. Clockwork nightingales sang with ceaseless sweetness in the arbours, black clockwork peacocks with green and blue, real and seeing eyes in their fans, patrolled the lawns.

  “You are in my care, Drezaem,” Azhrarn said. “You will live by night, as the moon does. This palace I give you. But you shall lack for nothing.”

  Azhrarn guided the young man through the gardens into the palace. A banquet was already prepared and lay waiting. Drezaem needed no encouragement to gorge himself as he had done in the palace of the king. Perhaps he noticed this was even better. When Drezaem was satisfied, Azhrarn said: “There is one last thing you crave. I will remind you. A girl with silver eyes and primrose hair. Even this I have not neglected.”

  Then Azhrarn took up a ewer of alabaster. He opened the lid, and spoke certain words, and upended the ewer into the air. What poured forth was a cloud and a glow and a perfume, and these things resolved into a gorgeous woman.

  It was not Shezael, indeed not. It was not Azhrarn’s plan that the soul he had divided should be reunited in any form. Demonaic vengeance had the habit of becoming a game. Azhrarn, in some magic glass of the Underearth, had seen Bisuneh shrivelling in her wretched fane, and turned his eye after on the half-souled daughter, and he observed that weird, random forces were intent upon her salvation. Intrigued by the sport, Azhrarn had set himself to thwart them.

  The woman poured from the alabaster ewer was one of the Eshva. Her shape was surpassingly beautiful; she was, too, part of the jestling of Azhrarn. Like all demon-kind her eyes were black, not silver, yet the lids were painted with silver, sparkling with silver. Like all demon-kind, her hair was also black, yet in this black hair were masses of flowers, not garlands but actual growing plants, sprung invisibly from the strands of hair and from the roots of it. Pale, pale flowers of greenish yellow, tiny, ever-blooming primroses clustered thick in those dark tresses as dew upon a leaf.

  Drezaem gasped. This loveliness struck even his unwoken senses, as the eyes of Azhrarn had fathomed his muddy brain.

  The name of the Eshva woman was Jaseve. Before, the young man had tired quickly of a single body, a single face. But the demons were not of that order, men did not tire of them, nor women either.

  Jaseve drew Drezaem into her arms that were like desire itself.

  Azhrarn was gone. Drezaem lay with the demoness upon a couch of incense. He bared her breasts that were like mounds of snow, she bared his breast, gold from the sun; he uncovered her loins’ black wooded valley even here spangled with yellow flowers, she uncovered him also and rested her lips against the burning tower his passion had built for him.

  The sun was not rising in the sky, but in the body of Drezaem. The chariot of the sun, drawn by its scarlet horses, plunged and thrust through
the tunnel of the mansion of Jaseve. But the horses did not, on this occasion, slip their rein. The eternal time of demons overmatched the human lover. He rode forever, a white arched bow upon the white crescent of her flesh beneath him, rode till he was molten, rode till he was fire. Only after many aeons of agonised bliss did he pierce and shatter the sun, and fall with its fragments many further aeons down into the ocean of Jaseve.

  As Azhrarn told him, Drezaem lived now by night, as the moon did. He woke as the daylight fled and the stars solidified in the ether. He would feast then, take his ease. A thousand unseen servants would tend him, provide whatever he had a wish for before even he could think of it. When he felt the urge for battle come on him, giants and warriors would appear at the brass gates, ranting challenges. He would slay them all gloriously—or seem to—they were illusions. Such red meat catered to his former tastes. For his other appetites, Jaseve was there. The sound of her step upon the marble floors was enough to stir him. Gulfs of pleasure, chasms of victorious violence, these blandishments ensorcelled him five nights. And when the five suns that followed those five nights were rising, Drezaem would fall upon his royal bed and sleep till the last color again left the sky.

  In this way he never saw what became of the palace as the sun crested the plain, never saw what became of his royal bed, the roses crushed beneath his back, the giants’ heads piked upon his gate. For these splendors and atrocities were the things of night. The sun struck them and they faded into air, all but certain solid clockworks made by the Drin. Trees dissolved like ink in water, towers wavered into smokes, peacocks lay in tarnished heaps. The only walls then about the sleeping youth were the barren tiers of the granite, his only shelter a rocky archway. Jaseve was gone to Underearth to avoid the day. Drezaem lay alone in a sorcerous stupor until the dark should come again, and Azhrarn should come again and remake the palace about him, and Jaseve pour from the alabaster ewer with the primroses growing in her raven hair.